Garbage would emerge out of the
90’s blending together techno, shoegazing, powerpop, grunge, and post
- punk, but by the early to mid 2000’s the band was hanging on by a thread. . Today
let’s explore the history of the band Garbage. The history of Garbage really began several
decades prior to the formation of the band. Since frontwoman Shirley Manson was a lot younger
than the rest of the members, the men in Garbage had already had a long history in the music
industry seeing both the highs and the lows. Drummer Butch Vig and multi-instrumentalist
Duke Erickson grew up in small town America. Vig hailed from Veroqua wisconsin was the son
of a norwegian doctor. Vig originally spent six years studying the piano before switching over to
the drums. At a young age he begged his parents to join tbe columbia house music club so he could
get his hands on a grand funk railroad record.
Erickson meanwhile grew up in lyons , Nebraska
a town of no more than a 1,000 people. A place where erickson would venture out
othe local appliance store to buy records. To both men, the pop music they
heard on the radio in their youth, seemed to come from a foreign planet given
that they lived in pretty isolated places. It would be ironic that years later
they would be played on that same radio. One of Vig’s earliest musical memories
was witnessing a Steppenwolf concert which inspired the same type of energy he wanted
to replicate with Garbage’s live shows. The city of Madison Wisconsin also played
an important rol3 in Garbage’s history. in the 70’s. The city was part of a thriving
music scene that saw nu-wave and AMerican and british punk rock groups playing at
a local legendary club named Merlyn. Madison was also the birth place of one of the
city’s most iconic band’s named Spooner who formed in 1974 by Duke Erickson. Erickson would
front the band while also playing guitar & he had initially planned on becoming an art teacher,
but music soon became his calling. It was during this time Butch Vig was studying at the University
of Wisconcin specializing in film direction. Both men had apparently met each other at the
university of wisconcin and by 1978 Vig was planning on moving to Colorado to become a ski
instructor, but Erickson who knew Vig convinced him to stay in Madison and join Spooner as
the band's drummer something he agreed to do. Vig would bring along another film student named
Steve Marker who would join the band as a roadie. Spooner would end up having some success in
the midwest releasing two well-received albums and opening for the likes of Pat
Benatar, Cheap Trick and The Police. Spooner would eventually fall apart with
the trio regrouping in same roles to form the follow-up group Firetown. But like a
lot of musicians the trio grew frustrated. Firetown released their first album for $5,000,
had a modest hit with the single carrying a torch and even had some exposure on mtv with
vig recalling to the morning call newspaper "All of a sudden all the major labels came
after us," "We ended up signing and doing a huge budget record in New York and touring. (But
then) everything kind of just fell apart. I mean, the classic things that happen to you -- your
A&R; guy leaves, your management breaks up, your tour support is pulled, your bass
player quits the band. All the disasters that happen to so many bands happened to us.
It kind of left a bitter taste in my mouth." It was this experience that convinced Vig
that he never wanted to play in a band again or go on tour. Marker and Vig started getting more
involved in music production investing in a four track recorder. Marker and Vig opened up their
own studio in Madison in the mid 80’s called Smart Studios. Soon enough, Vig's production
career started to take off. He would work with local Madison act , Killdozer, and land work from
one of America’s biggest indie labels at the time Chicago based touch and go records. His
success as a producer didn’t happen overnight. He would produce hundreds of bands telling the
Morning Call "I did polka bands, an opera singer. I produced jazz and country bands and heavy metal
bands." By the 90’s Vig started producing more high profile acts including Nirvana, the Smashing
Pumpkins and Sonic Youth. Despite his massive as a producer Vig would admit to the Morning Call
that he didn't want to be typecasted saying 'i didn't want to be known as well he's a grunge
producer." it was during the same time period that vig, marker and erickson would lay the
foundation for what would become garbage. The trio would begin taking the music of U2,
and Nine Inch Nails keeping the vocal tracks but erasing all the instrumentals and recording
his own music. Vig would tell the Washington Post "That's what got me back into it," "When we do
remixes, we erase everything and basically rewrite the songs. And for the first time in about four
or five years, I was writing and playing again." "I'm a sucker for a pop song and a
great hook. I'm really a pop geek We wanted to write melodic pop songs and have a
lot of guitar hooks but also experiment and put in all kinds of crazy noises, distort the drums or
cut them up, run it backwards, whatever" he'd say. Vig and company had an idea that this
new project would remain as a studio act with a revolving group of vocalists. The three
men agreed that the first singer they wanted to work with should be a female and it was by
strange coincidence that Marker and Vig were watching MTV one night when they saw a band
named Angelfish performing the song Suffocate Me. Fronting the group was a sultry woman
named Shirley Manson. Vig recalled to Yahoo, “We were all very struck by it. I think the thing
that really drew us into the song, and to Shirley, was she singing really low and understated at
the time. A lot of the bands on 120 Minutes, or sort of the alternative music scene that was
breaking, were full-on roar. We just thought that Shirley was kind of doing the opposite of
what a lot of singers were doing at the time. Within 24 hours The trio were able to
get in touch with Angel Fish’s label who passed on shirley’s information to them and a
meeting was setup with her at a hotel in london.
Manson hailed from Edinburgh, Scotland Born
in 1966. Her mother was a big influence on her as she was a singer performing in big bands,
while her father was a geneticist.. Manson would soon become fans of groups like The Pretenders
and Siouxsie and the Banshees. A gifted child she would take up music at a young age playing piano,
violin, clarinet and even attended theater camp. Despite her talents she was very hard on herself
as a child hating her and i quote “pugly-ugly” looks, while her sisters were lavished with much
more attention and praise. Manson rebelled telling Spin magazine “I was unhappy at school and wanted
to be bad so i became very truculent and insular and started playing siouxie and the banshees
and screaming really really loud i hate you, i hate you. I started wearing my dad’s clothes
all the time and hiding behind black eye makeup.It was just not a nice time. My mum lost her
singing voice because she was so angry with me because she got so upset with my delinquency. ”
Despite rebelling against her parents she had a pretty solid family relatively speaking, growing
up in the neighbourhood of Stockbridge which was full of broken hippie homes telling Spin “i really
should have had no complaints about my upbringing considering that all my friends were from these
broken hippie homes. We were pot smoking early because my friends parents gave us joints. My
friends mother was a prostitute another friends mom was addicted to alcohol and antidepressents.
My eyes were opened up quite early: she'd say. Manson would end up leaving leaving school at 15,
working at a clothing store start hooking up with boys and go the night clubs dancing the weekend
away. By the age of 17 in 1984 she would join her first band the post-punk out Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie
as a backup singer. It was during this time she got into tulmultous relationship with the group’s
frontman Martin Metcalfe telling Loudersound “I felt so plain and normal, and like such an
incredible fraud for not really doing much in the band,” she says. “I was also involved with a
man who lived a pretty wild and extreme existence, so there was a lot of madness and excess.
I just longed for a bohemian lifestyle. I would go out to clubs every night and dance
myself stupid. That felt like a freedom. Goodbye Mr. MacKenzie had a little taste of
success having a single called The Rattler that charted in the UK peaking at number 37 in
the spring of 1989. Manson’s relationship with Metcalfe would fall apart and she eventually
left the group. She would soon find herself playing with the outfit Angelfish who nabbed
a recording contract with Radioactive Records. The group released one album and did a brief
tour before she joined the group Garbage. Now let’s get back to that meeting
between the men in garbage and manson. Within 24 hours of witnessing Manson’s performance
on MTV, the men were able to contact her record label who passed on her information to them.
Soon enough a meeting was arranged in London at a hotel. While it seemed like a big break for
Manson she wasn’t initially sold on the idea given that the men were significantly older
than her and already had connections to the music industry telling the LA Times
“I come from a background of what I call working bands,”“That means we basically
traveled around doing [crummy] gigs. There’s a certain snobbishness that exists among bands
like that, where ‘producer’ becomes an ugly word. So when I joined this band, my attitude toward the
other [members] was ‘You don’t know everything.’ “Once I started to work with them, though,
I quickly realized that not only were they musicians with a profound knowledge of the studio,
but they were also passionate about what they wanted to do musically--even persnickety
about what sounds they wanted to make.” Arrangements would be made for Manson to
come to Madison to rehearse with the band.
She would tell Yahoo about the chance she
took auditioning for the band sayingYou know, traveling from Scotland to
Madison, with no money in my pocket, no way of really getting home, no way of touching
base. I wouldn't recommend that for anyone. But I was very lucky that they weren't creeps. They
could have easily been creeps, and at least one of them could have been a weirdo, but they were
really great. The audition process didn’t really go as well as you might have thought. Erikson
would recall to Loudersound “We couldn’t get into Smart Studios because it was full, so we had
to set up a makeshift studio in the basement of Steve’s house. We ran a mic cable upstairs to the
lounge, where Shirley sat all by herself. It was a bleak couple of days in winter. I’d go up and
check on her now and again and she would just be staring out the window.” Itw as during this time
that Manson was staying in a hotel in Madison with Vig admitting to yahoo it was a scene similar
to the shining with shirley being the only person staying in that particular wing of the hotel.
Manson for her part lied to the band claiming she was a songwriter even though she wasn’t admitting
to yahoo “They just said, ‘OK, we're going to play some music and you're going to just come see what
you come up with, see what comes up off the top of your head.’ And I had never done any writing
before in my life up to this point, but I had lied to them, saying yes I was a writer, because
I thought if I was honest and said I didn't write, I wouldn't get a chance of auditioning. .. I think
they were like, ‘Oh my God, who's this loser?’ And I went home, and their management called me up
the next day and said, ‘I hear the audition didn't go so well yesterday.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah,
it was terrible. But I feel like maybe if we had another go, it might go better.’” Thankfully,
Manson’s future bandmates felt the same way. Manson would return home with some of the demos
she had worked on during her time in Wisconcin and this is where things took a turn for the
better. She soon started writing lyrics for the songs Only Happy When It Rains and Vow and when
the men got in touch with her to audition again there was finally a sense of direction to the
band’s sound. The men in Garbage buried their plans to have a revoling cast of singers.
But there initial plans to remain a studio act weren’t fully abandoned yet. Manson would
admit to the Washington Post "Touring is a very intimate and closely formed activity"and I
was frightened of going near a stage with three people I didn't know. I remember saying,
I'm not playing with you guys live!' But at the same time their songwriting partnership blossomed
Manson would admit the band changed their tune on touring after filming the video for Vow. The music
represented the first time the band performed live together. While Manson may have felt insecure in
her new band, Vig reinforced just how important she was to the group telling Spin “You know
if we hadn’t met shirley there quite possibly wouldn’t be any garbage.We wouldn’t have put
a record out and we would have gone back to producing. Our ideas were so obvious and literal
Shirley really helped give us more of a context.
It was also another characteristic of
Shirley that made her fit in with the group and that was her honesty and outspokeness.
So where did the name Garbage come from? Well a friend would hear an early rehearsal
and said that the band sounded like garbage. Vig would tell the chicago tribune. "He kept
laughing and chanting 'Garbage, garbage, garbage,' and I told him, 'We're gonna to turn that garbage
into a song & thus the band's name was born.
The band's debut album featured some songs
containing as many as 120 tracks & Shirley would recall to the LA Times how far along some
of the songs were when she joined the group saying “By the time I joined the band,” “they
had these little sketches of songs, but nothing was finished. Some of the ideas
for lyrics I found unsuitable, and others I liked and worked on with them. I always went
to bat for what I believed in she'd say. The album’s themes dealt with obsession,
voyerurism and hedonism and self-destruction. The group would land a recording contract
with boutique label Almo records, which was distributed through Geffen.
The label signed the group after A&R man bob bortnick discovered the group. The band
was soon the subject of a bidding war between different labels with Bortnick telling billboard
magazine “they were the best sounding demos I ever heard. I was really knocked out, but i didn’t
say anything.” Bortnick who was new at the label only having worked their for several weeks was
careful not to push his ideas. But luckily for him the band enjoyed the idea of working with a
new label and signed with Almo. When Bortnick met the band for the first time in Madison, they sent
a garbage truck to pick him up for the airport. Ahead of the band’s debut album dropping, there
was a lot of self doubt about this new project. Vig would tell the washington post "I was
terrified, particularly because no one knew who we were," says Vig. "They knew who I was, and I knew
if the record came out and bombed and if we went out and sucked live, no one would remember Duke,
Steve and Shirley, it would have been me because I had the highest profile at the time." Vig
would also admit in other interviews that those close to him told him not to do the band thing.
The group's self titled album was released in August of 1995 It barely cracked the billboard
200 charting at number 193 Their success in America happened really accidentally. The
track "Vow" licesend to a UK magazine and cd sampler publication named Volume in late
1994. it was subsequently picked up by BBC Radio 1 DJs Steve Lamacq and John Peel, who
played it on their show in December of 1994. The first stations to embrace the band in
America was Seattle’s KNDD and KROQ or K-Rock in Los Angeles. Both stations program directors
stumbled across the band’s promotional single in that copy of Volume magazine. Vow was already
hitting the airwaves in America may of 1995 several months ahead of the album’s release and
the label was taken aback by the reception and was not really prepared for it. This would
result in Vow not really getting the proper promotion it deserved. Despite that the song
still peaked at number 97 on the hot 100 charts. There were talks of re-releaing the
single down the road, but the label opted to put out a different song from the record.
As the band focused on hitting the road to support the album, they ran into a problem. How would they
replicate the studio recordings in a live setting. Vig would recall to the washington post.
we realized pretty quickly that we couldn't do that. Once we started freeing ourselves up
from having to translate the songs that way, we started speeding them up and changing
keys, doing different intros and outros, started ad-libbing things"he'd say.
Helped by a string of hugely successful singles including Vow, Only Happy when It Rains.
Queer and Stupid Girl Coupled that with an outake called , "No. 1 Crush," appearing on the
multiplatinum "Romeo + Juliet" soundtrack in addition to a a grueling 18 month tour the
band’s self titled debut record moved several million copies in America. Manson’s bandmates
took a backseat to their singer whose honesty and personal appearance attracted a lot
of attention.. Hailed as a sex symbol Glamour magazine would identify her as and
i quote “poster girl for rock’s new glamour” While she would wear various designers and sell
her own makeup on the band’s website, companies including teen fashion house contemporary casuals
would even hire a model bearing some resemblance to manson in their marketing campaign. A
spokeperson for the company at the time would say “Shirley is definitely an icon that
young girls can say now there’s somebody i can relate to & look up to. She’s got an edgy kind of
bare bones cool essence that isn’t overpackged.” Three years later the band returned with
their highly anticipated follow up Version 2.0 As the software like title suggested it was
meant to be more of an improvement over what worked. . Manson wrote virtually all the lyrics
on the album resulting in a much more personal, direct and revealing record than its
predecessor. Vig would reveal to the Morning Call "We thought it would be a mistake to
reinvent ourselves,". "We felt we really kind of carved out our turf and established our
identity. That's really important these days, because so many bands have one hit and then they
disappear. We wanted to take everything we did on the first record and make it better." adding "The
first album was put together, very much more cut and paste over a long period of time, and a lot
of the songs took a much longer time to develop. This time, all four of us were in the studio. And
from playing live together (the band toured for 18 months in support of the debut), there was a
certain chemistry and dynamic that had developed. It was the first time we actually recorded live
in the studio. "we were all more comfortable working this time around because we knew each
other," says Vig,. The album was another success going platinum spawning the singles i think i’m
paranoid and push it, by the way who remembers playing NHL 2000 on the PC back in the day?
But expectations, self-esteem issues and just the craziness of being thrust into the public
spotlight weighed heavily on the members of the band with Marker recalling to Loudersound
We didn’t realise how crazy it all was,” flying into Europe from America on a private
plane for one night to play at the MTV Awards, and having Mick Jagger walk into our dressing room
to say hi. It was all going so fast. And that, mixed with our bizarre self-esteem issues, always
thinking we had fucked everything up, didn’t allow us to see the big picture.” Manson would add
“I was thrilled by our success but embarrassed about it too,” Manson admits. “It was as if it
meant that in some way we must suck. I also felt like I had to be something I wasn’t. I would freak
out if I hadn’t had a manicure, like I wasn’t being a good pop star. I felt as though everybody
was disappointed when they met me in real life, because I was aware I was working with
incredible image makers and that I didn’t look like that. Mad, twisted, sick thinking.
And it made me ill in the end" she'd say. Three years later in September of 2001 Garbage
released their third album beautiful garbage. The material was mostly written during the
version 2.0 tour. Manson would chronicle the progress of the album online in numerous blog
posts, becoming one of the first big rockstars to do this. The band would deal with business
issues in 2000 as their label almo records folded after universal music group purchased them
resulting in a prolonged legal battle with universal. The lawsuit Garbage filed against
Universal Music Group Claimed that the company is and i quote is "effectively holding [singer]
Shirley Manson as ransom" by threatening to uphold stipulations in a contract she signed in
her previous band Angelfish which was signed to Radioactive Records which was now alsoowned by
UMG)” — stipulations the suit claimed have been ignored since Garbage came to fame in 1994. Manson
would tell Loudersound We brought out our third record [2001’s Beautiful Garbage], and we were
due to promote it the day before the September 11 attacks and then the whole world changed.
Musical tastes changed and we were plunged into decades of, for the most part, sugary pop. All of
a sudden we were an old-fashioned band that nobody wanted to hear from. Our record company were
furious because they wanted to make money, so they wanted us to change our sound and they wanted
us to compromise. We were not prepared to do that. To counter the demands of the label of moulding
her into a popstar she cut her hair short. And dyed her hair blond. During the tour drummer
butch vig would be diagnosed with heptatis A followed by bell’s palsy resulting in the
group bringing in a few replacement drummers, In addition to that Manson was going through
an ugly divorce with her first husband Eddie Farrell claiming in the same interview
“At that point I was a basket case,” “It was an incredibly painful divorce and it
sent me off the rails. I just felt very scared and panicked in the world, not able to
trust anyone. So nobody, not even the band, knew what I was going through she'd say.
The band’s fourth album bleed like me almost never came out as the group's chemistry
seemed to be disappearing Released in the spring of 2005 the band called it quits six months later
while on tour when tensions within the group and with their record label came to a head. Vig
would tell Loudersound “I remember feeling an unbelievable sense of exhilaration when we finally
decided to quit the tour,” “It had been ten years and we were worn out and sick of each other.”
Manson would add in the same interview“We were barely even speaking,” “We didn’t want
to talk to anyone outside of the band about the problems we were having with our
career, so of course it turned into this whole passive-aggressive thing between us. I just
wanted to get the f out of there and go home.”
During their time off the men in garbage went back
to producing while Manson worked on a solo record, collaborated wth other artists and appeared in the
tv show Terminator: The sarah connor chronicles. The band members would reconvene in 2010 due
to personal tragedies. Manson’ mom would pass away due to dementia in 2008, while the following
year mutual friends of Manson and Vig dealt with the death of one of their children from cancer.
Manson and Vig woul see each other at the funeral and talk things over and jam sessions with the
other members of garbage would be initiated. The band would release three albums since their
reunion including 2012’s Not your kind of people, 2016’s strange little birds, and
this years no gods, not masters. That does it for today's video guys thanks
for watching. Be sure to hit the like button and subscribe and we'll see you again
on rock n' roll true stories. Take care.
